The Third Sunday of Advent

 15 December, 2024

Philippians 4.4-7; Luke 3.7-18

The Rev’d Devin McLachlan

This weekend a group of friends came to stay with me, some of them folks I hadn’t seen in years. So I made my favourite vegetarian chilli, and decided to try a skillet cornbread.

Cornbread is a simple dish of the American frontier — cornmeal, milk, oil, an egg, and a rising agent such as baking powder, cooked in a cast iron skillet. Out of curiosity, I checked the recipe reviews, and came across this one star gem:

Just tried this recipe. I substituted coconut oil for the vegetable oil and used 3/4 plain yogurt and 1/4 almond milk. Worth noting I made the cornmeal myself by blending popcorn kernels  and cooked this in a bread pan instead of a skillet.

Was pretty disappointed with the taste.

The reviewer concluded:  I really should’ve added a lot more sugar.

Friends, there is no Sugar in this recipe. 

But don’t we do that all the time? Clearly, the fault was not in my changing all the ingredients and trying to mill cornflour from popcorn kernels. I just didn’t add enough sweetness and light! Yeah.

That cornbread disaster of a review is a salutary reminder to pack our hermeneutic of suspicion on this Gaudete Sunday, when we break out these Rose investments and light the pink candle on the Advent wreath. It’s the Advent Sunday of Rejoicing. “Rejoice in the Lord always,” Geoff read at the ambo, “again I say rejoice.”[1]

And then the preacher opens the gospel book and says, “You brood of vipers.”[2]

Wow. So much joyful. Amaze.

It was my first sermon text,  in Watertown, Massachusetts, over a quarter century ago: You brood of vipers. It was satisfying to act at being a hellfire and brimstone preacher, sinners in the hand of an angry God. But even in the mere three months that I’ve been here at St Bene’t’s, you’ve probably figured out that I’m outwardly a fairly cheerful Christian. But I don’t think you can get to the joy of the letter to the Philippians without the repentance that John the Baptist preached. 

What the recipe needs is not more sugar, but to have followed the instructions in the first place.

One of the things that distinguishes John the Baptist from Jesus  is that John seems comfortable answering direct questions with direct answers. He is a prophet in that great tradition of clear instructions about justice. It’s not a complicated recipe, John tells us; in fact it’s really simple:  ‘Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.’[3]

And then Luke shows us that John really knows how to cook.

It’s a subtle cue in Luke’s language; I missed it myself:  At the beginning of this Gospel passage, Jon was preaching to the crowds.  By the end of the passage, Jon is preaching to the people.

The crowd had begun as disparate ingredients: Temple soldiers, tax collectors, pickpockets and publicans.  They thought what made them a people was having Abraham as an ancestor, but Luke refers to them only as “the crowd” — But by the end, it was in turning from sin and selfishness that made them into a people,

Specifically, Luke tells us, they were  “the people…filled with expectation” (3.15).

The crowds didn’t need more sugar to become a people, they needed to start working with the right ingredients: Repentance. Mercy. Justice. Love.

Not with sugar but with the hard graft of joy, that we too might be a people filled with expectation. Joy is that rising agent in this Gospel recipe; it does not sweeten but does lift up.

Joy may even start bitter, as baking powder does on the tongue: Bear fruits worthy of repentance (3.8) Luke’s John tells us — what a phrase, fruits worthy of repentance.

Unlike happiness, which relies on external conditions, joy (Henri Nouwen tells us) is "the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved and that nothing -- sickness, failure, emotional distress, oppression, war, or even death -- can take that love away.”[4]

Joy wells up from the deep places carved out by our sorrows and our repentance. It rises from a lifetime of striving against the brokenness of the world. Joy is the Grace that calls us to turn away from sin and turn to Love, to bear one another’s burdens,  to be a people filled with expectation. 

This Gaudete Sunday, let the fruit of your repentance not be a small morsel, but a joy that springs up,  wild and deep and true. As Mary Oliver wrote:

            If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it..…whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.[5]

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding,  will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

[1] Philippians 4.4

[2] Luke 3.7

[3] Luke 3.11     

[4]  You Are the Beloved: Daily Meditations for Spiritual Living by Henri J. M. Nouwen and Gabrielle Earnshaw

[5] excerpt from Mary Oliver, ‘Don’t Hesitate’, published in Swan: Poems and Prose Poems